[vtkusers] 3D program

[Paul Welton]

Anner Adrian wrote:

> Hello ,
>
> I'm looking for a 3D program (like 3D Studio MAX, Light Wave 3D,...)
> to work together with vtk. Does anybody work with a 3D program in
> combination with vtk. what program can you recommend? I also thinking
> about a small animation which I want make in the progam and show it in
> a vtk application.

I have actually been working on a program resembling your description, although I have
initially used a pure software rendering graphics toolkit (TSIPP, by Mark Diekhans). However,
I want to exploit the hardware acceleration that Open GL provides, and was thinking of using
Vtk as an interface to it. I put out a posting on this (6th August) but had no replies. In the
meantime, I had greate difficulty in building Vtk, and found an alternative package, TkOGL, by
Claudio Esperaca which is very small and easy to build, and provides the access to OpenGL from
Tcl that I need. So I am tending towards forgetting Vtk for the present. If you were
interested in the program however,  it can be downloaded from:

http://www.neosoft.com/tcl/ftparchive/sorted/graphics/TSIPPwb/1.4
http://www.neosoft.com/tcl/ftparchive/sorted/graphics/TSIPPwb/1.4s

You will find HTML documentation, and all binaries necessary to run on Linux. The
"supplementary" download contains extra examples which could not be contained in the main file
due to size limitations on this repository.

A presentation on the TSIPP Workbench was made at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in San
Diago on 26th July.  You can download the
presentation slides (Star Office 5.2) and the paper itself (PDF) from:

ftp://ftp.oreilly.com/pub/conference/os2001/welton_072601.sdd
ftp://ftp.oreilly.com/pub/conference/os2001/tcl_papers/welton_tcl2001_J.pdf

The motivation for creating this tool is that while there are many packages for rendering and
processing 3D images, support for creating 3D drawings and animating them interactively is
limited. The tool also aims to create new Tk widgets through drawing which appear as 3D scenes
and represent information, for example the state of an industrial process; hence the projects
sub-title, "Working Widgets Without Code".